Cell Phone Service

As far as Big Brother is concerned, nothing that you do on your cell phone is ever private. And if the government really wants to see what is on your cell phone, they are going to get that information one way or another, even if that means resorting to physical violence. On Monday, NBC News provided us with yet another glaring example of how the United States is being transformed into a Big Brother police state. On January 1st, Akram Shibly and Kelly McCormick from Buffalo, New York were coming back home from a trip to Toronto, and they didn’t anticipate any unusual problems when they got to the border. Unfortunately for them, U.S. Customs & Border Protection agents decided to take their cell phones, demanded their passwords, and kept them in custody for the next two hours as they searched for anything that might be incriminating on those phones.

You might be thinking that sounds like it should be illegal, and you would be correct, but sadly federal courts have ruled that our constitutional rights do not apply to border searches. So authorities use this legal loophole to do pretty much anything they want at the border.

If that young couple from Buffalo would have had something illegal on their phones, they could have been immediately arrested and put in prison.

And we haven’t even gotten to the worst part of the story yet. Just a few days later Akram Shibly and Kelly McCormick took another trip to Canada, and this time border agents physically assaulted Akram when he did not immediately turn over his phone. The following comes from NBC News…

Three days later, they returned from another trip to Canada and were stopped again by CBP.

“One of the officers calls out to me and says, ‘Hey, give me your phone,'” recalled Shibly. “And I said, ‘No, because I already went through this.'”

The officer asked a second time.

Within seconds, he was surrounded: one man held his legs, another squeezed his throat from behind. A third reached into his pocket, pulling out his phone. McCormick watched her boyfriend’s face turn red as the officer’s chokehold tightened.

Is this still America?

I can’t believe that this is what the United States has become. When I was young I remember reading about this sort of thing in Nazi Germany, the USSR and Communist China, but I never imagined that it would happen here. For years I have been warning about this growing “Big Brother police state control grid”, and I wish that more Americans would realize how evil all of this government surveillance truly is.

You can watch an interview where this couple from Buffalo talks to NBC News about this recent incident at the border right here. It is so disgusting that this is how we are treating law abiding people when countless numbers of drug dealers and gang members are pouring across unprotected sections of our border every single day.

Unfortunately, cell phone searches at the border appear to be rising at an exponential rate. According to NBC News, more cell phone searches were conducted at the border during the month of February 2017 than in the entire year of 2015…

Data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that searches of cellphones by border agents has exploded, growing fivefold in just one year, from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 25,000 in 2016.

According to DHS officials, 2017 will be a blockbuster year. Five-thousand devices were searched in February alone, more than in all of 2015.

And of course it isn’t just searches at the border that you need to be concerned about.

The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement, according to people familiar with the work.

The CIA and the U.S. Marshals Service, an agency of the Justice Department, developed technology to locate specific cellphones in the U.S. through an airborne device that mimics a cellphone tower, these people said.

So the next time a strange plane flies over your house, this may be what is happening.

The program operates specially equipped planes that fly from five U.S. cities, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population. Planes are equipped with devices—some past versions were dubbed “dirtboxes” by law-enforcement officials—that trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.

I have a feeling that if this program was ever challenged in court that it would be ruled unconstitutional, so let’s hope that happens as soon as possible.

But then again, the NSA has been collecting and storing all forms of electronic communication for years and nothing is being done about. We have even had a 36-year veteran of the NSA named William Binney come out and publicly admit that all of our phone conversations “are being monitored and stored” and still nothing is done to stop it.

So don’t do anything on your cell phone that you wouldn’t want the government to see, because someday they could use it to nail you.

Of course we also need to use discretion regarding the things that we know the public will be able to see. When you post something to Facebook or Twitter, you may think that it is harmless, but it could end up costing you big time. In fact, I just came across an article about how a number of pastors have actually been fired because of what is on their social media accounts…

“It’s not fair I lost my job,” the pastor told me.

“My church members post a lot worse things than I do on social media. It’s a double standard.”

He’s right. It is a double standard. But it’s reality. And, with greater frequency, more pastors and church staff are losing their jobs because of what they post, particularly on Facebook and Twitter and, to some extent, their blogs.

By the way, churches will not always tell the pastor the specific reason for the firing. But, once we begin to infuriate our church members with our posts, many will find a myriad of reasons to give us the boot.

Like the title to this article says, what you do on your cell phone could come back to haunt you.

For many Americans, cell phones have become an essential part of modern life, but the truth is that those little electronic devices can also destroy our lives if we are not careful.

So if you are going to use them, use them wisely, because people are watching.

Did you know that the federal government is giving out free cell phones and free cell phone minutes to welfare recipients? It may be hard to believe, but it is true. Right now, there are companies that are running advertisements specifically targeted at low income Americans informing them of the fact that all they have to do is sign up and they can get a free cell phone and hundreds of free cell phone minutes every single month and it will all be paid for by the federal government. Some have referred to this as “The Obama Phone”, but that is not exactly accurate. The outrageous federal programs that are paying for this were initiated before Barack Obama entered the White House. But the fact that welfare recipients have been receiving free cell phones and free cell phone minutes under both the Bush and Obama administrations has been confirmed as being true by Snopes. All of this is paid for by “the federal Universal Service Fund”. That is one of those annoying little taxes that you may have noticed on your phone bill. So what is essentially happening is the federal government is taking money from all of us so that they can provide free cell phone service for welfare recipients every single month.

When some of my readers informed me of this free cell phone scheme, I decided that I better go to the source. So I went over to the FCC website, and it turns out that there are two federal programs involved. “Link Up” provides a one-time connection discount on phone service, and it can be applied to the cost of a cell phone. So this is where the free cell phone comes from. “Lifeline” provides a monthly discount on telephone service. So this is where the free cell phone minutes each month come from. The following is a description of these programs from the FCC website….

What Benefits are Available Under the Lifeline and Link Up Programs?

Lifeline provides discounts on one basic monthly telephone service (wireline or wireless) for qualified subscribers. These discounts can be up to $10.00 per month, depending on your state. Federal rules prohibit qualifying low-income consumers from receiving more than ONE Lifeline service at the same time. That is, qualifying low-income consumers may receive a Lifeline discount on either a home telephone or wireless telephone service, but may not receive a Lifeline discount on both services at the same time. Lifeline also includes Toll Limitation Service, which enables a telephone subscriber to limit the amount of long distance calls that can be made from a telephone.

Link Up Up provides qualified subscribers with a one-time discount (up to a maximum of $30) off of the initial installation fee for one traditional, wireline telephone service at the primary residence or the activation fee for one wireless telephone. It also allows subscribers to pay the remaining amount they owe on a deferred schedule, interest-free. Federal rules prohibit qualifying low-income consumers from receiving more than ONE Link Up discount at a primary residence. That is, qualifying low-income consumers may receive a Link Up discount on installation or activation charges associated with either a home telephone or wireless telephone service.

Apparently these programs are becoming quite popular.

You can find a company called Safelink Wireless offering welfare recipients a free cell phone and 250 free cell phone minutes a month right here.

You can find a company called Assurance Wireless offering welfare recipients a program that is virtually identical right here.

When Comcast acquired NBC Universal earlier this year, an FCC-mandated requirement was that the cable giant offer cheap Internet access to low-income households. Comcast is making good on the mandate through a new program called Internet Essentials.

Families who qualify will be able to sign up for 1.5-Mbps Internet access – the same download speed as AT&T’s basic DSL service – for just $9.95 a month. Customers may also be eligible for a computer that costs just $150 and free Internet training.

Low-Income Gasoline Assistance Program Act – Directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to make grants to states to establish emergency assistance programs to pay eligible households for the purchase of gasoline.

These days, as long as you are “eligible”, just about everything you need will either be purchased for you or subsidized by the federal government.

Yes, we will always need programs to help take care of the poor, but some of the things that go on today are absolutely outrageous.

There are millions of people out there that have become extremely comfortable receiving government benefits and it will be extremely difficult to ever get them to give them up.

After all, why bust your behind for 40 or 50 hours a week at some meaningless, low paying job when you can live a similar lifestyle by just depending on government benefits?

The following is a rap video that shows the kind of mindset that is developing all across America. Please be advised that it contains some very strong language. It was done by a rapper known as “Mr. EBT”, and it is a perfect example of the kind of attitude that many welfare recipients have today….

Yes, everyone needs a helping hand once in a while. But if you do have to rely on government benefits for a time, you should be fighting like crazy to improve your situation so that you can get off of them as soon as possible.

Of course the biggest welfare recipients of all are the big corporations. The federal government showers billions upon billions of dollars on them every year, and this has got to stop.

General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn’t pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.

Can you imagine a 57,000 page federal tax return?

That is absolutely disgusting and it is a perfect example of how corrupt our system has become.

All year long, GE has people pouring over the tax code just looking for any little tax loophole that it can exploit.

GE made $14,000,000,000 in profits, but they paid less taxes to the government than you or I did.

There is something very, very wrong with that picture.

All of this unnecessary welfare has got to stop.

No more free cell phones for people on welfare.

No more giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to big corporations.

We simply cannot afford it.

The U.S. debt problem is way, way out of control. We have piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and it gets about 150 million dollars worse every single hour.

Sadly, none of this is likely to change any time soon.

The big corporations provide the money that our politicians need to win campaigns, and most of our politicians are very careful not to bite the hands that feed them.

On the other end of the spectrum, our economy continues to crumble and the number of poor Americans continues to increase. So even if we don’t provide them with free cell phones, the truth is that the number of Americans that need basic food and housing is not going to go down any time soon. In fact, it is going to go a lot higher in the years ahead.

We are rapidly becoming a European-style socialist welfare state.

In America today, the poor are absolutely showered with outrageous government benefits and so are the big corporations.

So who pays for all of this?

You and I do.

I am afraid that the joke is on us, and nothing is going to change as long as we keep sending the same kind of politicians back to Washington D.C. over and over.